BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Schemes, Adultery and Dark Palaces in Denmark

By RICHARD EDER

Published: April 24, 2000

Striding over the hills and breaking them, like T. S. Eliot's Cousin Nancy Ellicott, comes Rose Tremain. Literary hills these, and gaudily flowered. Ms. Tremain, conjuring spells one moment and knocking them all of a heap the next, sows and tramples.

Author of ''The Swimming Pool Season'' and ''Restoration,'' this British writer can be wonderfully ungainly, though it is truer if less grammatical to say that she is ungainly wonderful. She courts the Muse rather like the man who pursued women with an outrageous question, and when asked if he didn't get frequent slaps replied, ''Yes, but also some hugs.'' If the comparison is bawdy and on the rough side, Ms. Tremain is also bawdy and, taking risks to achieve a fierce fineness, falls rough when she misses.

Like Angela Carter, whom she rangily resembles, Ms. Tremain could be called a magical feminist, more of an adventurer than a prescriber. Her men as well as her women are outsized. Both entrance her, and she puts them all through a hard time.

The outsizing is in part external. In ''Music and Silence'' as in ''Restoration'' she goes back to the 17th century to give herself room to expand and to move her characters with a fablelike freedom and distance. Largely, though, the outsizing stretches internally to the far places of passion and soul. Often it ends up not far from home, and rather happily; but the way has been a long and agitated roundabout.

''Music'' opens with enchanting bravura. Peter, an English lutenist, arrives one night at the palace of King Christian IV of Denmark where he is to join the royal chamber orchestra. He follows a silent courtier down dark hallways. Ms. Tremain transports us to a time when light was the exception and darkness the normal condition of nighttime interiors.

Christian, heavy, melancholy and with ''a face like a loaf,'' is compulsively weighing silver coins on a scale. ''I weigh the same pieces over and over again, to ensure that there is no error. No possibility of error. I am trying, piece by piece and day by day to reimpose order upon chaos.''

Christian is an arts patron, a builder, a man deeply troubled by the impoverishment of his realm after the Thirty Years' War. He dreams of love, order and beauty, but royalty weighs him down as heavily as his corpulence. Kirsten, his wife, has come to detest the husband who calls her ''Mousie'' and indulges her every whim. ''Why do husbands refuse to understand that we women do not for long remain their Pet Creatures?'' she asks, greedily resorting to a lover with whom she can be a rattlesnake.

Loving music for its perfection, the king compels his musicians to play in a freezing cellar for the unique effect with which the sound rises into the music room through specially designed ducts. Desperate to restore and embellish Denmark, he goes from one failing scheme to another: an ill-designed silver mine that collapses, a whale fleet he cannot pay for, an abortive effort to raid the well-concealed gold in his mother's palace and an arrangement to pawn Iceland.

Christian is the centerpiece of the story, a complex shifting balance of obliviousness, longing, scruples, ruthlessness and sweetness. He stands as one of Ms. Tremain's male avatars: oppressor, dreamer and a dangerous, sometimes lethal innocent. Kirsten is a figure of at least equal fascination: a woman warrior, a female Don Juan: as alone at the end and as glitteringly defiant. She, however, uses sex (sometimes with a bisexual nuance) not for domination but, in a dominating male society, for autonomy.

The key to Ms. Tremain's writing, however, goes beyond such emblem atics. It comes down to: ''what a piece of work is a man'' . . . and a woman. The wit, the humane impulses, the mixture of self-awareness and self-deception, the glints of charm, make of Christian and Kirsten far more than what they represent. These same qualities light up many of the other characters that throng the book and represent in various ways other aspects of the male-female divide. There is Sofie, Christian's mother, artfully hiding the gold that is her only power from the son who uses his power to claim it for loftiness.

In one of the book's lethal parables, we see Sofie as a young woman engaging in the forbidden practice of knitting. Why forbidden? Because women's thoughts stray when they knit, and perhaps to dangerous places. Men were convinced that ''any knitted night bonnet might contain among its million stitches the longings of their wives that they could never satisfy.''

There is Vibeke, whom Kirsten's mother insinuates into the palace after her daughter is expelled -- Christian's patience turns brutal -- in a fish cart. Vibeke is carefully groomed to please the king; in fact she falls in love with him as a man in need of being cared for. He finds in her not only love and kindness but also an active intelligence that encourages him to shake off his depression and renew his reforms.

If Christian is one specimen of the male, a countering kind is George, an English squire and the fiancee of Charlotte, sister to Peter. Laughter and a delight in the variety of things -- and in Charlotte most of all -- are the guiding spirits of this expansive and memorable figure. The betrothal party is a fireworks of happiness; a scene of unexpected loveliness that I doubt few writers other than Ms. Tremain could bring off. One of the few, perhaps, is Penelope Fitzgerald.

Ms. Fitzgerald's ''Blue Flower'' could be a model for ''Music'': oddly enough, since it is formally so restrained and the wilder and more magical for it. Ms. Tremain's own magic is weakened and sometimes clogged by awkwardness and self-indulgence: too many characters and side plots whose high colors and elaborate patterns become loose and aimless distractions.

On the other hand Peter, a semi-angelic figure who should be a central character, is pallid and only partly realized; so is his love, Emilia, despite her own stormy family drama. The magic remains, however. ''Music'' is vital, wise and, when it is not stumbling over its spells, spell-binding.